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The quest for immortality is the stuff of legends. From the Spanish explorer
Juan Ponce de León to Harry Potter’s headmaster Albus Dumbledore, the
fascination with the elusive “fountain of youth“ is one that transcends time.
Buildings, like humans, also experience a finite life span. At its conclusion,
they, like us, face an end: demolition. Through the practice of adaptive reuse,
however, this end, for some buildings, can be denied and perhaps even
postponed indefinitely in an immortalization of sorts. (fig. 1)
The desire to evade death is universal. We find numerous and varying prom-
ises of life after death in religions of all denominations, from Christianity to
Hinduism. With a common objective to posit life as an unending cycle, the
various religions offer nuanced views of extending life. The immortality en-
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abled by the practice of adaptive reuse, like that in religion, is similarly nu-
anced by different intervention strategies. An examination of these concepts
in major religions offers us a point of departure for such concepts in adaptive
reuse.
The Christian concept of afterlife is premised upon the resurrection of Jesus
Christ, who died and was raised from the dead after three days. This resur-
rection, implied by the evidence of an empty tomb, was additionally corrob-
orated by Jesus’ appearance after death to his disciples on the road to Em-
maus. In resurrected form, Jesus resembled himself from the moment of
death. Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas depicts this resurrected Jesus who, as
proof of his existence, displays the wounds inflicted by crucifixion to his
disbelieving disciple. Jesus stayed on earth for only a short period of time
before he ascended to heaven. Our knowledge of him remains at age 33, an
age that is instrumental to our understanding of his role in history.
Wong, Liliane. Adaptive Reuse : Extending the Lives of Buildings, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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FIGS.1–2: Plimoth Plantation and Greenfield
Village are resurrected to the respective
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Structures that have lost their relevance in time are sometimes resurrected
from obscurity for posterity. Small communities of buildings such as colonial
Plymouth or the village of young Henry Ford are examples of such structures
that are no longer pertinent as living cities. Their significance lies in the recall
of a moment in history. Their preservation as living museums maintains
these specific moments in time: Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachu-
setts, USA, as the original 17th-century settlement of English colonists in the
New World and Greenfield Village in Detroit, Michigan, USA, as the late
19th-century community in which Henry Ford invented the Model T. Populated
by actors, these interactive museums recreate life of that particular period.
Like Jesus Christ, these structures are brought back to life, restored to a
time that is most representative of their role in history and suspended for-
ever in that moment. (figs. 1, 2)
In Christianity we find a second type of resurrection in the account of young
Lazarus whom Jesus, in performing his miracles, restored to life four days
after an untimely death. Lazarus returned to life in real time, resumed the
cycle of living and eventually died a second, natural death. Lazarus’ resur-
rection is differentiated from Jesus’ by his ability to age with time. Lazarus’
resurrection is a temporary immortality and a brief reprieve from death. The
Hedmark Museum in Hamar, Norway, also a living museum, is differentiated
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FIGS.4a–b: Sverre Fehn‘s interventions at the
Hedmark Museum (the Storhamar Barn), Hamar.
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war-ravaged square was restored with new modern buildings behind a re-cre-
ation of the 17th century facades. The replicated 17th-century shell is skin
deep, as the facades are disengaged from the modern functions of the
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buildings behind them and the roles of their occupants. In this restored state
the market became anew the heart of Old Town, filled with outdoor cafés,
musicians and vendors. While the square is once again infused with a bus-
tling spirit, it is a spirit made possible by the restoration of the facades. The
reconstructed facades serve as the embalmed double of the 17th-century
Old Town Market Place, to which the spirit of touristic commerce returns
each day. (figs. 5a–c)
An Eastern approach to afterlife, reincarnation is rebirth as another form of
being. Complex variations exist between different beliefs — Hinduism, Bud-
dhism, Sikhism, etc. — with an accord, however, in the belief of the immuta-
bility of the soul within a changing body. This analogy is applicable in adaptive
reuse for a majority of existing structures that gain a second life, serving a
new and unrelated function. From church to apartment building, from jail to
hotel, factory to museum, change of use is a common phenomenon for old
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FIGS.6a–b: Remains of the Gothic St. Kolumba
Church knit into Peter Zumthor‘s Kolumba
Museum, Cologne.
buildings. While frequently attempted, many such conversion projects fail due
to a lack of recognition and even denial of the essence of the existing struc-
ture. The Kolumba Museum in Cologne, Germany, and the Selexyz Bookstore
in Maastricht, Netherlands, are, by contrast, examples in which the reuse of
an ecclesiastical structure is premised on the essence of the original one.
Severely damaged in the bombing of Cologne, only parts of the exterior wall
and tower and a statue of the Mother of God atop a pillar remained of the
Gothic Saint Kolumba church. These relics of the old structure are knit phys-
ically into the facade as part of the collection in the new diocesan museum.
Their original placement and significance are points of departure of the con-
version. As highlights of the museum, the ruins provide not only an enhanced
experience of history that inspires the language of the new architecture but
a continuity of the building’s original intent. (figs. 6a–b)
In the Selexyz Bookstore, where the existing church was entirely intact, the
intervention instead referenced the rituals inherent in the church typology.
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Program functions such as the wine bar are placed in the altar and apse,
alluding to the transubstantiation of Christ at the altar. Such juxtapositions
through building program connect, albeit with wit, the old and new uses. The
presence of the soul, the essence of the host building — physical or referen-
tial — distinguishes a project of adaptive reuse from that of a simple change
of function. In the proviso for the endurance of the soul may lie a principle
for a meaningful practice of reuse. The lack of this condition can be seen in
Frankenstein’s failed creature. (fig. 7)
An entirely different immortality emerges in the 21st century for a society in
which the role of religion has diminished. In its place is a newfound rever-
ence for technology and the opportunities it portends. New construction
means, for example, enabled the translocation of the 1888 Harriet Rees
House in Chicago, Illinois, USA, one of three surviving Romanesque Revival
houses in the city. Over time, urban development had slowly changed the
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FIGS.8a–b: The UNESCO town of Hallstatt and
its duplicated self in China.
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FIG.9
Roman excavations.3 With their deaths and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s
Sack of Rome in 1527, the Renaissance of the popes officially came to a
close. The ascension of Paul III to the papacy during the Reformation led to
the establishment of the first Commissioner of Antiquities, Latino Giovenale
Manetti, who was instructed “to ensure that the monuments … are well
maintained as possible, and will be freed of scrub and ivy; no new buildings
will be attached to these and nothing will be demolished, burnt in a limekiln,
or be removed from the city.”4 Despite the clear intention of this charge,
subsequent popes were less overt in their adherence to a preservation of
heritage.
Pope Pius IV, who ascended to the papacy in the Counter Reformation, in-
stead advanced the practice of adaptive reuse. In 1561, he commissioned
Michelangelo to build the Catholic Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli e degli
Martiri within the ruins of the pagan Thermae of Diocletian. The thermae
Wong, Liliane. Adaptive Reuse : Extending the Lives of Buildings, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, 67
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FIG.10: Pope Pius IV.
Painting by Bartolomeo
Passarotti.
FIG.11a: The floor plan of the Baths of Diocletian with the
frigidarium at its center.
were the largest baths of ancient Rome and accommodated over 3,000
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and the decision to retain the ruins as a temporal reference are far-thinking.
The discussion of these relationships as key issues of conservation is not
broached for another 400 years. (figs. 11a–c)
Following upon the example of the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, oth-
er proposals for the reuse of existing monuments such as those pertaining
to the Colosseum illustrate an evolving mind-set in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Surviving a late-15th-century plan for demolition, the Colosseum was the
subject of proposals for new use that included an outdoor theater, a wool
factory with workshops and housing for the wool guild, a Bernini proposal
for a memorial dedicated to Christian martyrdom and a Fontana proposal for
transformation to a basilica. None of these grand schemes of transformation
materialized; it was instead used as a cattle pasture and a manure deposit
until an edict of 1744 by Pope Benedict XIV that “rigorously prohibited prof-
anation of this spot.”5
Wong, Liliane. Adaptive Reuse : Extending the Lives of Buildings, Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, 69
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FIG.12: Designation for
national heritage sites
in France.
1 Per Olaf Fjeld, Sverre Fehn. The Pattern of Thoughts (New York, NY: The Monacelli Press, 2009),
p. 116. 2 Transl. Clyde Pharr in collaboration with Theresa Sherrer Davidson, Mary Brown Pharr, The
Theodosian Code and Novels, and the Sirmondian Constitutions (New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange,
Ltd., 2008), p. 472. 3 Alois Riegl, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (Los Angeles: Getty Research
Institute, 2010), p. 163. 4 Jukka Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation, (Oxford: Butter-
worth-Heinemann, 1999), p. 34. 5 Charles Isidore Hemans, Catholic Italy, Its Institutions and Sanc-
tuaries Pt 2, (Florence: M. Cellini and Co., 1862), p. 13. (Digitized by Oxford University.) 6 John H.
Stubbs, Time Honored: A Global View of Architectural Conservation (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons,
2009), p. 195.
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